Cruising
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Warlow, 72, sails
a Rustler 36 based at
Dunstaffnage. He has
sailed round the UK twice,
round Ireland and to the
Faroes, as well as starting
http://www.scottishanchorages.co.uk.A
mongst the very many
attractions of cruising
around the coast of the
UK are not just the pubs,
restaurants, golf courses,
swimming pools, scuba
diving areas, historical sites, castles,
aquaria, wildlife, bracing walks, beaches,
chandleries and other less interesting
shops – but also museums, mostly billed
as maritime museums. Not just the
tourist honeypots like the Marie Rose or
Cutty Sark, but small museums, full of
local history and interest, run on a
shoestring (mostly by volunteers),
cherished by local people and seldom
crowded. And yet they are rarely if ever
mentioned in the guides to harbours
and anchorages that appear in so
many yachting magazines.
For a comprehensive list of more or less
everything out there, there is an excellentwebsite: Maritime and Naval Museums in
Britain and Ireland, people.ds.cam.ac.uk/
mhe1000/marmus. It includes about 300
museums, with good maps and links, and
is very useful for making contacts and for
anyone writing guidebooks (or indeed
sailing directions). Of course, I have only
been to a small fraction; but to give you
a taste of what there is, and to encourage
you to get off your boats and take a look,
here are 12 gems.➜
Maritime museums
Charles Warlow recommends 12 British maritime museums which are
well worth visiting should you happen to be cruising in the relevant locale
Today, it’s hard to equate Maryport in
Cumbria with its prosperous 19th
century past: it was once the third-largest
coal port in England, and home to the
Holme line of clippers that traded all
over the world. It currently suffers from
terrible unemployment, but somehow
it rises above all that with the friendly
Life Boat Inn, and right next door is the
delightful Maryport Maritime Museum.
It is well laid out, with excellent activities
for children: for example, they can learn
the meanings of the code flags and spell
their names with them. There is also
a display of games sailors used to play
on board ship.
■ http://www.maryportmaritimemuseum.btck.
co.uk
1
Maryport
Maritime
Museum
2
The Mull
Museum,
Tobermory
The Mull Museum is easy to miss, even
though it’s bang in the middle of the
main street along the harbour front. This
may be because it is small, modest and
not painted in bright colours like many
of the surrounding houses. It is a great
wee place inside, however, with all sorts
of bits and pieces not just of maritime
interest, such as the tawse – that leather
strap once used by teachers to whack
naughty or ignorant children across
the palm. You can learn about the
remarkable story of Neptune 2, a
Canadian sailing schooner on a 12-hour
coastal trip round Newfoundland in
1929 which was blown across the Atlantic
by a gale to end up nearly wrecked on
Ardnamurchan Point 48 days later. You
can also find out about the ‘Terror of
Tobermory’, the admiral who trained
recruits for the Atlantic convoys in the
Second World War.
■ http://www.mullmuseum.org.uk3
Stromness
Museum
The main
street in
Stromness,
Orkney,
known
simply as
‘the street’,
is a
museum
piece in its
own right,
and one
has to walk most of its delightful length
before reaching the lovely Stromness
Museum. This records the town’s history,
which has been so wrapped up with the
sea: whaling (returning sailors had to be
treated for scurvy), the Hudson’s Bay
Company (in 1800, 418 of the 524
employees were Orcadians), Arctic
exploration (John Rae was a son of
Orkney) and the scuttled German
First World War fleet in Scapa Flow
(now a serious tourist destination for
scuba divers).
■ http://www.orkneycommunities.co.uk/
stromnessmuseumArctic explorer John Rae in his inflatable boatOtter (own work) GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)